Car telephones have achieved tremendous success over the last decade due principally to the advent of cellular telephone systems that have vastly increased the market for car telephones because of dramatic cost reductions over prior single transmitting and receiving station systems.
Thus far, the design, manufacture and installation of vehicular telephones have principally resided with mobile telephone manufacturers and their downstream marketeers, and they are installed on the vehicle as an after-market item as opposed to being installed as an original equipment option on the vehicle by the vehicle manufacturer. There are, however, presently several automobile manufacturers that offer an on-board telephone system as an original equipment item but thus far most original equipment manufacturers have been reticent to offer original equipment telephone systems as an option on a wide variety of their vehicles, principally because OEM manufacturers have no present capability in design of telephone systems, their installation, start-up, maintenance and repair, although this posture by the automobile industry appears to be changing.
Presently automobile telephone systems, whether as after-market options or original equipment options, are designed to be mounted on floor mounted pedestals, forward and to the right of the operator's seat, or on the stationary console between the operator's seat and the right front passenger's seat, and there also appears in the marketplace a dashboard mounted telephone.
None of these locations are optimal for telephone systems because they either require the user to hold the telephone handset in hand while making a call or in hand-free systems require the operator take his eyes off the road when dialing numbers for a significant period of time, and both of these situations detract from safe driving, and vehicle accidents resulting from using these types of telephone systems are frequent.
Thus far, the location and design of presently available OEM and after-market telephone systems are not attractive both from a convenience standpoint and from a safety standpoint.
The optimal location for a vehicular telephone keyboard and its associated LCD display is on the vehicle steering wheel assembly because there the keyboard is much closer to the operator eliminating the need for the operator to bend over to dial a floor-mounted hands free phone, eliminates the requirement in some systems for the operator to actually hold the handset, it positions the microphone much closer to the user's mouth so that some improvement in the audio quality results, and as an OEM option can utilize the already in place horn harness for the transmission cable.
There have in the past been several somewhat crude suggestions for steering column mounting telephone systems such as in the Umebayashi, U.S. Pat. No. 4,455,454; the Ishikawa, et. al., U.S. Pat. No. 4,698,838; the Kamei, et. al., U.S. Pat. No. 4,723,265; the Suzuki, et. al., U.S. Pat. No. 4,847,887, and the Martin, U.S. Pat. No. 4,850,015. In the Umebayashi patent, for example, a rather complex mechanism is provided for maintaining the telephone keyboard stationary as the wheel is turned, but since operation of the keyboard while the wheel is turning is not recommended from either a safety standpoint in either case, this system has found no commercial success.
The principal reason why these prior steering wheel mounted telephone assemblies have found no commercial success is the present day requirement for operator safety restraint systems which are optimally located on the steering wheel base, and these usually are air-inflatable systems. These safety restraint systems are energized by forward to rear violent deceleration sensing systems and effect air bag inflation very rapidly, on the order of 15 milliseconds, and the inflating air bag when released, impacts not only the operator's body but the operator's face and head area as well. The safety restraint system, when packed on the steering wheel assembly base, is covered by a flexible relatively soft synthetic material that must be designed to cause minimum human abrading upon release of the safety restraint system.
For this reason, prior suggestions for mounting the telephone keyboard and display approximately centrally on the steering wheel base are unacceptable because they would present a safety hazard upon operation of the safety restraint system.
In short, prior telephone systems designed for vehicular location while achieving considerable commercial success nevertheless are not optimally designed because of (a) poor keyboard visibility, (b) difficult to reach hands free keyboards, (c) obstruction of vision of other instrumentation, (d) operator and vehicle human safety problem, (e) interference with safety restraint systems, (f) difficult removal for repair, (g) unstable mountings, and (h) the requirement for separate new wiring harnesses.
It is a primary object of the present invention to ameliorate the problems described above in vehicle carried telephone keyboard displaying microphone systems.